What's brewing

I tweeted on Saturday that the Eurostar crisis will be a watershed in how social media is used in crisis communications in the UK. Much has been written since about the specifics. Fingers have been wagged (often in completely the wrong direction). And much social media ink has been spilled, some of it by me [No other industry is as navel-gazing as this one is it?]

So this post is NOT about pointing fingers. It's about the communications watershed. Crisis comms is changing. Social media, particularly how Twitter can and should be used, is moving towards maturity. And this is why.

Organisations which have previously used social media solely for marketing and brand-building campaigns now know just how important real-time updates on easily accessible social media channels are when they’re in a crisis comms situation.

And since Google has started indexing Twitter, it’s even more important than ever before for brands to own and use their own corporate Twitter channels to listen, to broadcast the latest news and information, and to engage with people affected and/or interested in what’s going on in a crisis. It’s resource-hungry. But increasingly expected.

The distinction between customer service and online PR is disintegrating. And never quicker than when that company is dealing with a crisis.

The four main principles for good Crisis Management

The key principles for dealing with crises haven’t changed in 15 years since I started in PR:

1) One person/team should monitor what the outside world is saying

2) Another person/team should get news out via the quickest channels available. When I started dealing with crises, this was the PA journalist covering the story. Then it became the 24 hour news journalists. Now, it's highly likely to be whoever is running your Twitter account and blog

3) Clearing what you want to say publicly with the lawyers/CEO/people trying to fix the problem is always more time-consuming than the comms team thinks it should be – so get the teams physically close to each other to speed things up

4) A news vacuum in a crisis will be filled with unsubstantiated speculation - which you want to avoid (see 1-3)

What has changed are the tools and channels available, and the speed at which information (and mis-information) travels. While Twitter never was (and never will be) “the answer” in a crisis, social media channels are too important to be used solely for marketing or advertising. Not when they will help define how an organisation is seen to react when something goes wrong.

Indeed, Forrester’s “hub and spoke” model for social media management bears an uncanny resemblance to a textbook crisis comms team – with people from customer service, PR, corporate comms, legal, HR, marketing and operations all represented.

I would therefore advise any organisation which has adopted social media since their crisis comms plan was last tested to dust it down and, alongside their media relations strategy, ask the following four questions.

1) Do you have a blog template and subdomain ready to add on to your own site – with a very accessible CMS ready for real-time updates where people are most likely to look? (Many corporate sites are not built for the frequency of update that people will expect in a crisis)

2) Do you own your own social media channels and have all those logins to hand, so that the crisis team can instantly commandeer all the channels available to decide which are the best to use?

3) Do you know how to stop all other commercial, especially social media, communications, if you decide you need to?

4) Do you have people in the core team who can use social media effectively?

Eurostar had plenty of other things to worry about this weekend - and attending to customers rightly took priority. Those problems have been well documented elsewhere (and will continue to be), and once up and running their social media response is proving effective.

But their experience is a watershed in crisis communications: social media should now be at the heart of all major crisis comms plans from the start. Digital comms and PR skills increasingly go hand in hand.

[this is a slightly longer version of a post originally written for Reputation Online.]

UPDATE: Brand Republic published a really honest and transparent interview with Emma Harris, Eurostar's Sales and Marketing Director this evening, in which she talks of stopping virtually all marketing activity immediately and says:

"We're the commercial department and we were kind of ready for social media but the business wasn't. To start involving crisis communication and disruption messages into social media, we just weren't ready for it.

Worth a read.